23 Feb 2025, 06:00 AM IST Illustration: Emil Lendof/WSJ, Getty Images Summary The DOGE leader says he is bringing a tech upgrade to the federal government while others see a blunt instrument. Gift this article There he was—the self-proclaimed Technoking—on stage waving around a chain saw. Elon Musk rode a populist wave to Washington, D.C., on the promise he would take his technologist acumen to the federal government, deploying artificial intelligence to root out wasteful spending and make things more efficient. So far, it doesn’t appear that Musk is using a scalpel. Rather, with the First Buddy spearheading Trump 2.0’s government-efficiency efforts known as DOGE, things have been messy. Musk has recommended gutting USAID, pushed for sweeping job cuts elsewhere and talked about getting rid of entire departments altogether. To many, that has made Musk’s efforts look less like surgery and more like performative butchery. Of course, the Department of Government Efficiency, as DOGE is officially known, is still in its early days. But the way Musk talks, it is clear he doesn’t see the need for much nuance in picking targets, given the levels of waste he says he sees. His blunt approach, coupled with the promise of using new AI technology, which few people fully understand, creates room for lots of worries. The future of work already looks scary. Many people fear AI will replace good-paying jobs and leave people without control over their lives. Rightly or wrongly, DOGE has become the general public’s first taste of how AI could rework work in America. Musk’s approach is also giving new flair to the boring and common restructuring process known across America in the private sector. In another, more tame setting, Musk described his work as such: “It’s like a corporate turnaround but at a much larger scale." Those were his comments—via video link—to a conference in Dubai about a week before Thursday’s CPAC appearance, where he brandished that chain saw. For the earlier World Governments Summit, Musk was touting his work as “tech support" for President Trump. He wore a black T-shirt with those very words. “There’s a lot of software systems that need to be updated and fixed, in some cases deleted, a lot of things that should really…be automated," he said. As he described his efforts, Musk sounded as he did years ago, when he was talking about his vision for automating factory work at Tesla, where he is chief executive. In those days, he was predicting a world where robots would handle the work of making cars with a few humans leftover to handle the machines’ maintenance. “Tesla’s going to have a factory without people," he said at the time. “The output per person will be extraordinarily high." Those plans haven’t worked out exactly like that. The dream remains. Now, Musk is pointing to the need to automate parts of government and reduce labor. A recent example that he has taken to pointing to focuses on how paperwork is handled for retiring government workers, what he describes as a time- and labor-intensive process. “They should be working on goods and services that are of much higher value to the public," Musk has said of those workers assigned to the effort. “If somebody just grew tomatoes in their garden and sold them at the farmers market, that would be more useful." Benign words, but Musk’s actions have been more threatening. And they have generated an intense reaction. Cable news guests are spending prime time talking about the threat of Musk’s AI. The Atlantic warned in a recent headline: “It’s Time to Worry About DOGE’s AI Plans." Groups are suing to stop the DOGE efforts. In one action, a group representing students of the University of California system sought to block access to records out of concern their data was going to be fed into AI to target cuts, subjecting the information to “significant security risks." Government lawyers argued in a federal court that DOGE workers accessed the data as part of their audits and were complying with rules on accessing personal information. The suit was unsuccessful. The LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, an early backer of OpenAI along with Musk, wrote a book—“Superagency"—that makes the case for why AI holds great promise, including within government. But he acknowledges that new technologies always appear threatening at first. Hoffman says the technology can be deployed in a more humane way than what is occurring in D.C. with DOGE. “I don’t think one needs to be cruel," Hoffman, a Democratic donor, told me and my colleague Christopher Mims for the new episode of the “Bold Names" podcast. “When we have these kind of Industrial Revolution transitions, they can be difficult. How do we steer towards the positive, towards the graceful, towards the more human outcomes?" Apparently, Musk is of a different mind. At this past week’s Conservative Political Action Conference, Musk and his MAGA fans reveled in all the upheaval. “This is the chain saw for bureaucracy," Musk shouted from the stage over the cheers while waving his newest prop above his head. It was a gift from Argentina President Javier Milei and came with a special engraving on the side. Translated from Spanish, it said: “Long live f—ing freedom!" For his part, Musk was dressed in a black jacket along with dark sunglasses and a gold chain—a look he adopted in real life after an AI-generated meme went viral on his social-media platform, X. It was fitting, perhaps, given that the popular name DOGE was born by meme as well. “I am become meme," Musk said. He was evoking what Robert Oppenheimer famously said after watching the first atomic bomb test: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Gift this article